Links, 9.13.10

At long last the Archaeologist’s family experienced the first day of school, a mixture of excitement and trauma. Well, mostly trauma, to be honest. The scholars were not about to give up vacation without a fight. They clearly belong to the summer-loving half of our family’s gene pool.

I belong to the other half, having been the sort of child who was trying on her school uniform a month before the first day (as my brother screamed, “MOM! Tell her to stop that!”).

Here’s my Back To School edition of links.

Postmarked: A lovely site called Philatelic Genealogy is compiling images of old postcards, letters and so forth. The material is indexed, and the site welcomes new material as well. h/t to Roxane Moore Saucier, Bangor Daily News.

Cautioned: This genealogy column out of Asheville, N.C. repeats what is becoming well-worn advice not to trust the Internet too far when it comes to genealogical information. However, I do like the author’s brave observation that online trees can be a good jumping-off point for fledgling researchers — as long as they don’t regurgitate them unthinkingly.

Merging?: In Scotland, three major records repositories have been asked to consider merging. They are the General Register Office for Scotland, National Archives of Scotland and Registers of Scotland. More here from The Herald (Scotland).

Classes, continued: Last week I mentioned the joy of online genealogy classes. Kimberly Powell draws our attention to more online classes at the FamilySearch.org site. And they are free!

Adoption issues: At the MyHeritage blog, they’re kicking off a series of posts and exercises aimed at researchers tracing adoptions in the family tree. While I’m not sure I would sign up for MyHeritage just to do this, it might be a nice tutorial for those who already have an account there.